Generation existential as comic keeps it real

PROLIFIC stand-up comedian, writer and podcaster Mark Watson has been so busy with festivals in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Edinburgh that he has barely found the time to fret about the future. Then again…

Following an online exchange with someone in customer services who turned out to be a chatbot, he has been reflecting on the long-term effects of living with artificial intelligence.

The 45-year-old father of two teenagers, who lives in North London with his partner, Lianne Coop, says: “I was successfully convinced that I was talking to a real person. I started doing this show well over a year ago now I suppose and I think now, we’re all slightly less naïve about bots.

“We’re all sort of accustomed to the fact that you might well not be talking to a human, but at the time I was still just about kind of wide-eyed enough to think that I was in what was a very repetitive, boring conversation with a customer services ‘person’.

“When I realised that it hadn’t been a real person, it was quite a sobering moment.

“We’ve done it to ourselves, so that I do find quite odd.”

Being a parent has helped to focus Mark’s mind.

“The show’s a little bit about that and a bit about by extension how I feel I’m behind the pace of life in my mid-forties and having teenage kids is a sort of mixed blessing.

“In a way it makes you feel older, faster, but on the other hand, without them, I don’t think I’d be able to navigate things at all.

“They’re tech-savvy and it’s just their world now, so at least having children gives you some sort of a foothold, it makes things seem less strange.

“Some of the time I’ve got no idea what they’re on about.

“The doomed customer service chat I had was about a photo book that I’d made which never arrived for my partner, because I’m very conscious of the fact that I’ve got thousands of photos that we’ll potentially never look at again.

“When I look through my phone, I’m just astonished by the archive of memories I’ve got there, and yet all of it is buried there, and that does sum up the broader nature of life in 2025, I think. We’ve got almost unlimited access to almost everything but we were never cut out to have that. I think it’s difficult for our brains to fit into this technological era.”

Music is another area where things are becoming ambiguous. “Fairly soon it will be difficult to distinguish between the AI and non-AI generation of work I suppose and the key question is whether we’ll care or not.

“If you’re in a café and you can hear a tune with lyrics that’s been made by AI, it makes you feel quite weird and queasy.

“About this time last year, I was in a café just round the corner and I heard a bunch of songs, it was a Christmas playlist but I didn’t recognise any of the songs, they were so generic.

“At this moment it’s very difficult for AIs to generate convincingly human lyrics I think or to write a novel or anything like that, but I don’t see any reason why they won’t be able to eventually, so then it becomes about what we think the point of having art is.

“I believe that we have things like books and music because of the connection between humans. But again as a society it’s up to us whether we really value that idea over the next sort of
10 years or however long.”

Mark published his latest book, One Minute Away, in July, about a romance between a delivery driver and his customer.

“That already feels like a long time ago,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing novels but the climate for them is pretty unforgiving now.

“I don’t want to be too fatalistic, there’s still plenty of great bookshops, but — and this is partly what One Minute Away was about — we’re all so accustomed now to getting everything we want at the click of a button.”

He has also started a murder mystery podcast, Murder of a Famous B*****d.

“I narrate it as a sort of not-very-good private investigator trying to get to the bottom of this murder. I wrote it and there’s a cast of comedians that come and go. It’s been hard to get comedians ever in the same place or to organise them.”

Mark’s shows and podcasts are just long enough, he says.

“My show is an hour and a half with a break and that’s about as much as you can ask anyone to focus on anything for now.

“I think all of us are addicted to short-term on the internet. That does disturb me because I think that as a civilisation we are losing something if everything that we do starts to be served up and consumed in 30-second chunks.

“At the same time, I’ve got a younger man who does things like TikTok for me so I can at least feel like I am present in that world, even if it’s by proxy.”

l Mark Watson: Before It Overtakes Us is at the Kenton Theatre on Friday, January 16 at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £25.25. For more information, call (01491) 525050 or visit thekenton.org.uk